Benjamin Butler’s time in charge of Union-occupied New Orleans in 1862 has become legendary. For his supporters, it was yet another example of the Union general’s administrative acumen. For his detractors, it showed Butler at his worst: trampling on the dignity and civil liberties of the Crescent City’s people, while abusing his authority to line his own pockets. Especially controversial was Butler’s treatment of New Orleans’ women. To end their contemptuous acts of civil disobedience, he threatened in his infamous General Order No. 28 to treat them criminally as he might prostitutes.

Less noticed, but equally interesting is Gen. Butler’s handling of African Americans in New Orleans and elsewhere in Union-occupied Louisiana. It makes for an interesting contrast with the same issue during his command of Fortress Monroe in Virginia, the year earlier, where he became the hero of African Americans and northern abolitionists for refusing to hand over escaped slaves to their rebel owners, establishing the “contraband of war” policy later enshrined in law as the First Confiscation Act of August 1861. In Louisiana, in 1862, Butler demonstrated that his treatment of African Americans was driven by pragmatism and not morality, and that he was as willing to victimize the slaves as to be their benefactor.

Butler’s first great test involving African Americans in Louisiana occurred in May 1862. The general had established his headquarters in the city’s federal customs house. The building quickly became a magnet for escaped and abandoned slaves. The state’s slaves had greeted rapturously the arrival of Union forces, seeing them as liberators, and some flocked to the customs house seeking sanctuary, no doubt expecting Benjamin Butler would give it to them as he had the slaves of Virginia. They quickly discovered, however, that General saw the situation in New Orleans and Louisiana more generally quite differently than he had that in Virginia the year before. In 1864, a friendly biographer of Butler summed up general’s thinking on the matter.

So Benjamin Butler clearly saw that from an administrative point-of-view, it made more sense to keep Louisiana slaves on their plantations than to give them sanctuary as he had in Virginia. He avoided worsening his refugee problem and kept New Orleans supplied with necessities. Butler also had been given no formal instructions from the War Department on how to deal with Louisiana’s slaves, but Abraham Lincoln had advised him informally before dispatching him to New Orleans not to do anything to complicate the President’s efforts toward devising an overall solution to the problem of slavery that he was working his way toward during 1862. Consequently, Butler, ever the astute politician, was not going to do anything to anger President Lincoln.

Still, from the point of view of Louisiana’s slaves, their treatment at hands of the hero of Fortress Monroe must have come as a nasty shock. Word of Butler’s treatment of Louisiana slaves was slow to make it north, but on July 3, 1862, a letter appeared in the New York Times, about the general ejecting slaves who had sought refuge in the New Orleans’ customs house, probably written by the former chaplain of 13th Connecticut Infantry, Charles C. Salter, who had resigned his commission as the regiment’s chaplain on June 15, 1862. It told the story of Gen. Butler granting about 200 slaves refuge in the customs house in May 1862 and then later ejecting the slaves he and his officers did not see fit to employ. The heart rendering letter read:

His betrayal evidently weighed on Butler, who would later claim he had considered issuing an order of general emancipation as a solution to his problems with refugee slaves in Louisiana, but stopped when President Lincoln countermanded just such an order around that time by his counterpart, David Hunter, commanding the Department of the South along the Atlantic coast. But his ex post facto rationalization of his actions in regard to the slaves New Orleans in Spring 1862 is contradicted by a conflict he soon developed with John W. Phelps, a subordinate in command at Fort Parapet, Louisiana, who did grant sanctuary to slaves. That is a story for Part 2.

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About Donald R. Shaffer

Donald R. Shaffer is the author of _After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans_ (Kansas, 2004), which won the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship in 2005. More recently he published (with Elizabeth Regosin), _Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files_ (2008). Dr. Shaffer teaches online exclusively (i.e., a virtual professor). He lives in Arizona and can be contacted at donald_shaffer@yahoo.com